‘That’s better,’ the old woman murmurs, peering through the dusty glass as if she’d forgotten there was a world out there.
DI Manvers moves across the room; Toni pulls herself up a little straighter and shuffles nearer to Nancy. The DI extracts two photographs from his inside jacket pocket and hands Toni the first one.
Nancy sees it is the photograph of Evie she found in the patient’s handbag.
‘Can you please tell us,’ DI Manvers says gently. ‘If this is your daughter, Evie?’
Toni stares at it for a few seconds. Everything – her expression, her body, her eyes – seems completely frozen. Everyone in the room holds their breath. A car passes on the road outside; a man walks by chatting animatedly on his phone. The sun ducks behind the clouds and the room darkens slightly.
And then it begins.
Toni’s hands begin to shake and a low, primal growl starts from deep inside her, climbing up through her body and exiting her mouth as a tortured howl that makes Nancy want to sob and run from its source.
Instead, she reaches over to Toni to hold her, but the younger woman shrugs her off.
‘Where is she?’ Toni howls, swaying back and forth in her seat. ‘Where is my baby?’
Anita sits on the arm of the sofa, crying and stroking Toni’s hair.
‘They’ll find her, love. Isn’t that right, DI Manvers?’ She looks up, her eyes filled with mourning, longing for him to say the words. ‘Tell us you’ll find Evie.’
DI Manvers opens his mouth and then presses his lips together. His face has turned a shade paler. He walks over to Toni and crouches down on his haunches in front of her.
‘Toni, can you tell me if this is Evie? Is this your daughter?’
Toni closes her eyes and nods, her whole body rocking in time with her head.
DI Manvers reaches for her hand. ‘Toni, I can’t, I won’t, make any rash promises to you today. But I give you my absolute word that I’ll do everything, everything, in my power to find Evie. Do you believe that?’
Toni opens her wet, red eyes and stares into his face, leaning slightly forward and squinting, as though she is trying desperately to see the future.
‘I believe you,’ she whispers. ‘I really do.’
He stands up and looks at the remaining photograph in his hand. Nancy sees him take a long breath in, as if he is bracing himself for Toni’s reaction.
‘And this is a photograph taken of the female patient,’ DI Manvers says. ‘The doctor removed the respirator for only a few seconds while we took the photograph, so it’s a little rushed.’
‘Why are you helping her to breathe when she might have abducted Evie?’ Anita asks in a cold voice.
‘We only suspect this at the moment,’ DI Manvers says, and turns again to Toni. ‘Mrs Cotter, do you recognise this person?’
Toni takes the photograph from him with shaking hands. Her eyes widen as they settle on the face in the picture. Her face instantly drains of colour. She stands up quickly, staring at the door. The photograph flutters to the floor and Toni follows it, her body crumpling like a discarded puppet.
Nancy kneels at her side, gently laying her hand on Toni’s cheek. ‘She’s fainted. She’ll come round in a minute.’
Soon, Toni opens her eyes and looks straight at Nancy.
‘It was her,’ she whispers, spluttering as the cracked and broken words emerge from her dry, parched throat. ‘All along, it was her. What has she done with my daughter?’
Part II
Present Day
61
Present Day
Queen’s Medical Centre
I wait and I wait and the clock keeps ticking and I wait and listen and wait . . .
Still, when the door opens it is a surprise.
I hear lots of feet shuffling into the room. I can smell them. Warm, sweaty bodies, desperate minds wanting to know just who I am and why I did what I did.
I hear sniffing and snuffling and a man’s voice whispers, makes comforting noises, and two sets of feet shuffle forward, nearer to my bed. And they’re whispering to each other – too low for me to hear the words – and then the whispering and shuffling stops and then, all at once, Toni Cotter’s face is above mine.
I might not have recognised her, had I not been expecting visitors. But it’s her alright. She looks terrible, a shadow of her former self. A ghost.
I did that. I sucked the life right from her, the day I took Evie away.
We stare into each other’s eyes. She doesn’t know if I can see her or not.
But I know she sees me.
‘I trusted you,’ she whispers, a tear falling from her eye and splattering on my cheek. Now a man’s voice. ‘You recognise this person, Mrs Cotter?’
She says nothing for a moment or two, and more tears explode onto my face.
‘Her name is Jo Deacon,’ Toni whispers. ‘I worked with her. I thought she was my friend.’
She squeezes her eyes shut and tears cascade down onto my face – and I blink.
I blink again and then I freeze.
She doesn’t see me.
Nobody sees me blink.
62
Present Day
Toni
The thing about nightmares is this.
While you are asleep, while you can barely function within the terror, there is nothing you can do but ride the awfulness. Once you wake up, the nightmare is still there. But you can begin to fight it. There’s the slightest possibility that you can start to do something about it.
Two days ago, I learned about Jo Deacon’s involvement in Evie’s disappearance, and the existence of a photograph of an older Evie, and I feel as if I have awoken from my nightmare.
I actually feel as if there might still be something I can do.
I decide to start by giving nurse Nancy Johnson a call.
63
Present Day
The Nurse
‘So, what’s the story, Joanne Deacon?’ Nancy’s face looms in close to the patient.
There is no obvious clue whether Jo, as she is apparently known, sees her or not, but Nancy knows that she does. She saw her blink yesterday when everyone crowded into the room. She opened her mouth to tell them, but something stopped her saying anything. What good would it have done? It would have given false hope to Toni Cotter for one thing, a woman who is a mere shadow of her former self and has suffered enough.
And then, last night, Nancy received a call from Toni, begging for her help.
‘You have to find a way,’ Toni had sobbed. ‘Only you can help Evie now.’
Nancy had responded kindly to Toni and asked her to give her a little time to think about the situation, but she had her own ideas of how she might be able to help this broken, desperate woman. These were unconventional ideas – the kind of thing that would certainly be frowned upon by her supervisors. Nancy made her mind up right there and then to keep quiet and try a little experiment with Joanne Deacon.
‘I’ll pop over and see you in the next couple of days,’ Nancy had reassured Toni. ‘In the meantime, don’t mention anything about this to DI Manvers.’ She knew he’d be speaking regularly to the doctors and hospital management team and she didn’t want anything slipping out in conversation.
Nancy stares down now at Jo’s unresponsive face and imagines that her own blurred features are sharpening in front of the patient’s eyes as she begins to come into focus.
Nancy is in uniform, tiny beads of perspiration dotting her top lip. She knows from the bathroom mirror this morning that her mascara is clogged in the corner of her left eye. The concealer under both eyes is badly blended and there’s a spot forming on her chin that threatens to be a quite a whopper.
Jo Deacon will see all this in close-up. She will see that Nancy is just an ordinary person. And if she plays the right game, she will start to believe Nancy wants to help her.
‘The police are speaking to your mother, your colleagues, Jo,’ she says. DI Manvers had told them that Jo Deacon had been living under a new identity for the last six years after serving time for fraud. They’d managed to trace her mother after discovering the truth. ‘There’s nobody here in the room but you and I.’ Nancy stares down at her. ‘I don’t believe you’re an evil person. I’d have felt it before now.’